Please, no flames.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Yes, it should be allowed to change to what it naturally wants to, but politics, not common sense, will make that decision.
Let's do it, I say. However, you my good friend, get to write the environmental impact statement..
BTW - My neighbor got in touch with her daughter. All is well. Thank you for your efforts.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
I've wondered about this, but, political impossibilities aside, how long would it take the water to scour a new river bed large enough to carry the water of Mississippi??? Aren't we talking about geologic time here? If vastly more water were allowed to flow down the Atchafalaya tomorrow, wouldn't we just have massive flooding problems all along that river's banks???
The Mississippi would not have to "seek" its own path. The path already exists as the Atchafalaya River and it already takes 30% of the Mississippi's waters. The more water that goes through it, the more it erodes and the more it will hold. It can handle the full load, but I don't know when it would be stabilized and safely navigable.
For converstaions sake, I'd suggest raising the level of NO as part of the rebuilding process. Bringing in mass amounts of earth to shore up NO, would reduce the dependency on the levies.
I'd also suggest a building code that would see most houses and businesses withstand a sustained 150 MPH wind.
Storm surge would be another vital issue that would have to be addressed.
I'd suggest zoning regulations that would see very little shipping containers left in coastal areas for any length of time. Build a quick method of moving the imports away from the port area almost immediately after it's offloaded.
I believe that a well designed berm configuration would allow shipping containers to be shielded from the brute force of the winds.
In short, a number of creative ideas could be incorporated to make NO and many other coastal communities a lot safer than they have been.
While I generally hate commissions, I'd like to see a community planning commission set up, made up of engineers and city planners, that could address and remedy many of the problems that cropped up during this hurricane. A number of coastal areas would benefit from the ideas studied and incorporated by such a group of people.
Sounds Good. Where are you going to divert it to?
I'm having a problem trying to get a grip on just how bad the New Orleans mess really is. I wonder if it might be easier and cheaper to write it off and rebuild elsewhere?
The damage is done, too late.
The folks in Morgan City are plucking many chickens and boiling a big tarpot.....in your honor....if they catch you.
That should certainly increase the price of petrochemicals and plastics. The Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is called 'Cancer Alley' for a reason.
Why not just turn Nawlins into the Venice of the United States? They have the water. All they need now is the garbage and the gondolas.
People still seem to lack a basic appreciation of just how powerful rivers and lakes can be.
The way we may be going is towards Houston becoming the New New Orleans. It would be unfortunate. It would certainly be convenient to have a port somewhere on the Mississippi close to the Gulf. The economy of Lousiana depends a lot on New Orleans, and the state will use what power it has to keep the city alive. And so does that of ports further up the river system. If there weren't a seaport in the lower Mississippi, river traffic would decrease. Consequently there's going to be a lot of pressure to rebuild a major seaport somewhere in Louisiana.
There's something that's distasteful in the "New Orleans destroyed for its sins" posts -- whether those sins are moral or religious or political or administrative. If you live in a country like ours with a wide variety of people and traditions, you're bound to offend someone else by being too strict or too lax, too rigid or too flexible.
In a lot of ways, the Anglo-American world was built on sea travel, nautical trade, and the cultural mix of harbor towns. Ports and commerce, the exchange of goods and opinions weakened the power of government bureaucracies and feudal overlords. The increasingly important idea of freedom owed a lot to overseas commerce. Rightly or wrongly, the desire for freer trade inspired our revolution and the other new world revolts.
Port cities like New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco have undoubted problems and faults now. Maybe you can only take cosmopolitanism and cultural receptiveness so far without making problems for yourself. Eventually it may overcome your own culture, but it's unfortunate that some people think that such cities are somehow damned by God.
It's certainly true that some big city dwellers mistakenly think that having dozens of cuisines to choose from makes them superior, but it's also mistaken to think that not having them makes one blessed. The great advantage of such port cities is that they break up the inertia and fixity of life in the countryside. It might appear nice to cut off all outside influences, but it's better to be exposed to the outside world and what's going on there, so as to be remain competitive and not taken by surprise. We may not want to live there, but a window on the rest of the world, and a city where people who are unhappy at home can go to make something of themselves can be a valuable thing.
I've been saying that we should move New Orleans to the high ground (20 feet above sea level) that is between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya. It isn't that far away and would still be connected to the existing port structures and surviving manufacturing facilities.
Next, build a sea-level canal that parallels the Atchafalaya to the new city and dredge a man-made port. Continue the canal with locks up to the current Mississippi channel. This route would be shorter to the Gulf than the current channel and would allow the levees below NOLA to be removed and sediment released to restore protective marshland.
Then, build a control structure to augment Old River Control so that when the channel does shift, you still have a channel from where the canal enters the existing to the point where the Atchafalaya breaks off and can maintain shipping along the length of the river - because when the channel jumps, the resulting channel will probably be unnavigable for a few years until the river works out the new gradient.
So you kill three threats with one major project.
The thing that many laymen fail to realize, I think, is that the current situation will continue to naturally worsen over time. The levees are a "Band-Aid" approach on a wound that does not heal.
We should allow controlled flooding and siltation of marshlands, allow a new channel for the river (and do any "rebuilding" there), and allow Pontchartrain to come more in line with its natural depth (i.e., let it drain to the Gulf). Continuing to fight against natural geologic progression is EXTREMELY costly and usually fails.